As Yggdrasil Burns
by Splintered Star
Summary: Triggering the failsafe always costs too much to bear, but Cecil no longer has any reason to hesitate. Spoilers through episode 44 and sort of AU.


Cecil texts Carlos before every show, reminding him to turn on the radio to listen. It's stupid and silly but every time Carlos texts back with "thanks, I lost track of the time!" or "already have~" Cecil smiles wide at the rush of affection and love in what is possibly his heart. Every time Carlos smiles at him, Cecil thinks that he'll never be this happy again in his entire life.

Tonight, Carlos does not text him back. At first it is disappointing, and then as he nears the end of the show, it is alarming. Nothing had happened in town today – nothing /new/, nothing except yellow helicopters and another 'missing' child, nothing that Carlos would be involved with – so why hasn't he -

"Oh, Cecil!" Cecil turns around in his radio booth, plastering a smile on quickly. Lauren, the voice of the new station management, grates at his ears and her vapid smile makes his hackles rise. "I'm sorry, can I pull you away from the soundboard really quick during the weather? Daniel will finish everything up."

He does not want to leave his booth, does not want to leave the show in their hands. What sort of lies do they want him to speak, this time? And how can he twist them, slip truth in under lies and cling to some vestige of sanity? He can sneak fewer and fewer coded truths into his show, lately. He says none of this, does not let out the scream bubbling in his throat. Silence keeps him safe, and keeps Carlos safe. Instead he just nods and follows her into her office. She closes the door behind him.

Carlos has still not texted him back.

* * *

Night Vale is not a normal town. This is blatant to anyone who survive their first screaming moments.

But many of Night Vale's differences are not so obvious to the newcomer. Indeed, being a newcomer prevents one from noticing at all.

John Peters has always been a farmer. The Council has always been the Council. Old Woman Josie has always been an Old Woman. There has always been a Voice in the Desert.

What the outsider does not know – what they, by definition, cannot know –

* * *

Cecil stares at the chipper woman, his eyes blank and black. All emotion has drained out of him, and he cannot even fake the perfect smile they desire. She smiles at him, her smile twisting in a mockery of sympathy as she ignores his reaction.

"You see, Carlos didn't want to stay here, and didn't want to stay with you," Her lies burn his ears and his throat spasms, but he does not weep. He will not cry give them that. "So he… went away. To…work. Somewhere far away. But it's better this way! Now there's nothing stopping you from giving your all to Strexcorp!"

He stares back into her pure black eyes. Part of his mind is scrambling to find possibilities, options, stuttering on the knowledge that Carlos still has not texted him back – the rest drips with knowledge and the stark realization that he has run out of options. He finally says, "No, there's nothing stopping me now."

She thinks it is agreement. It is not.

* * *

The scientists were the first outsiders to come to come to Night Vale intentionally in decades. Night Vale takes in the lost and the abandoned, any who wander in on the desert winds, but these strangers sought it out, and that made them unusual. Old Woman Josie watched from the back of the hall, and then pulled Cecil aside to ask, "Will you do it?"

Cecil blinked yellow eyes at her over unsalted biscuits. There was a faint ache behind his eyes, but he just said, "Of course, I'll try and get an interview!" even though he knew that wasn't what she meant.

She stared at him for a long moment, lets out a breath, and apologized for the lack of salt.

She asked him again, just before the yellow helicopters circle her house. She caught his arm as he passed her on the street and stared into his blue eyes, asking, "Will you do it now?" He stared back at her, feeling his eyes shift to dark red, and swallowed.

"No." She tilted her head at him, eyebrows raised. He knew now what she meant, the knowledge dripped into his mind slowly with every twist in the wind, but he knew also what it would cost. "I…can't. You know why." Her expression twisted with something resembling sympathy, or possibly pity, and she inclined her head before walking past.

The morning after Lauren lies to his face, after a sleepless night and a dozen failed attempts to call Carlos, he slumps on her threadbare couch and looks around with dark purple eyes. She isn't there. She hasn't been seen in months.

But perhaps something of the long-gone angels lingers, because the house is free of dust and in the moment between him closing his eyes in despair and opening them again, a glass of cold tea appears on the side table. He does not smile, but takes it and raises it in thanks to whomever offered. He hears the question echoing inside of his head and lets out a breath.

His fingers clench around the class and he nods, once.

* * *

What an outsider, by definition, cannot know is this:

There is only one Night Vale.

However, there _have been_ four hundred and seventeen Night Vales.

At least, probably. Old Woman Josie stopped counting after a while.

* * *

Cecil tries Carlos' number one last time, just to be sure, as he walks towards his radio station. It rings once, twice – and then hope and doubt bloom in his throat when it picks up.

"…Car-" Cecil barely breathes out before Lauren interrupts.

"He left, remember?" His fingers clench on the phone and his eyes swirl with bright furious pink. "He left his phone with us, because he knew you would try to call him and he didn't want-"

Cecil hangs up. The phone immediately starts ringing again. He drops it on the asphalt and keeps walking. A helicopter circles overhead and he ignores it.

This will work better in his radio booth.

* * *

The process is without not its damage. The fabric of reality has been twisted so often it tears. Sentience splatters and biologic programs bug. Things get trapped, carrying a truth that reality no longer reflects: a clock tower that was stripped of everything except existence; cassette tapes that record a life that, now, never happened.

The minds of constants are confused, disconnected from their own existences. Steve Carlsburg, who sees every reality except his own; Dear Dana, who slipped between the cracks; the vagrants, the mad, who do not know what they remember.

The Old Woman remembers. The Council remembers.

The Voice remembers, but only when it needs to.

* * *

Some of the guards around the radio booth start to shout when they see him, but Cecil was a very good Boy Scout, and he disarms them easily. He kicks out, knocking one back, and doesn't look to see where the guard falls.

The bloodstone doors respond to his touch, as they always have – always, always, old whispered knowledge in the back of his mind reminds him – and walks through the place that is his home far more than any apartment or house ever was. He had thought, with Carlos – he shakes his head, cutting the thought off. The break room is empty, covered in yellow paint and Strexcorp posters – but they have begun to singe at the edges over the Grave of Interns, and the paint over Khoshekh's grave is streaked with blood and ash.

He pauses, a few seconds that he can barely spare, to think of Dana, trapped away in the wastes; to think of Old Woman Josie, gone in a swirl of yellow helicopters; of Janice, his niece who never returned from her camping trip, and of Tamika Flynn, who went down screaming her rebellion into the skies. He thinks, for one lingering moment, of Carlos, lost to him now and forever.

Then he calmly pushes another guard into a particular broom closet and ignores the crunching noises as he steps into his booth. It is empty, though he scowls at the attempt to spread viscera and gore across his pristine radio booth. He wipes blood off of his chair, unwraps the intestine from his microphone and lets out a single breath as the equipment kicks on in response to his presence.

"Hello, Night Vale." He says, knowing that he will be heard. He does not say anything more. There is no point, now.

Instead, he takes a deep breath, and then Voice of Night Vale screams.

* * *

The Voice is Cecil Palmer and Cecil Baldwin and Cecilia and Elieen. It is male and female and both and neither. It is brown and white and red and kind of greenish, tall and short, tattooed and not. The Voice is and has been all of these things and all the memories and knowledge pour in as the Voice rips everything out.

Some things are constants, those things and people without which Night Vale, already so precariously balanced, would crumble.

Everything else – every invader and every friendly visitor- is washed away into the Void.

And the town resets.

* * *

"Greetings from Night Vale, everyone!" Cecil chirps as he sits in the radio booth. He frowns a bit – that opening isn't quite right, but oh well. He can fix it.

It's his first day doing the show, and he is so excited!

"A group of scientists briefly visited today," It's the news of the day, and it's his job to report it. Gosh, this was so neat! "However, they all left after…" His voice cracks, like it hasn't in years, and his throat closes. "They did not stay after…" He swallows. His eyes are burning. "I am very sorry listeners," he croaks out. He blushes in shame but there is something deeper underneath it. "I'm afraid I need to go to an ad."

He hits the button and buries his head in his hands, and he doesn't know why he's suddenly crying.

(He only finds out later that one of them stayed.)


End file.
